THE PASSIONATE
SKEPTIC Tales from long ago and far away
...

The Five Minute Future*copyright (c) Thor May
1997, all rights reserved

Bits of Clarry
kept leaking into the past. Small bits but there they were; enough to be
troublesome. A typical bit of future Clarry would dribble back from two
seconds ahead. But yesterday he had thrown up his arm a whole minute
before a drunk in the Winsome Hotel had taken a swing at him.

Memories from the
future Clarry weren't so bad. The younger Clarry could chew them over for
a bit and when their proper time came, deliver with some panache and a
turn of phrase that had begun to startle his lecturers. Clarry was a
mediocre student in a mediocre regional university. McKinnock's jaw had
fairly dropped when Clarry anticipated the exposition of Chomsky's Minimum
Distance Principle by fully 30 seconds. McKinnock was just a chapter ahead
of his students, and this kind of prescience threatened a major
catastrophe.

Janet edged away
from him a little after that moment too. She was a sensible girl who had
been confident of managing a comfortable and placid fellow like Clarry.
But Clarry didn't mind this new notoriety for intellect too much. The
novelty gave a rather pleasant twist to old put-downs and, anyhow, another
species of woman had begun to notice him. Yolanda.

Trouble was, the
damned leaks didn't seem to be selective. They were as likely to be a
gross neuro-muscular signal as a future memory of McKinnock's lecture.
Take that embarrassing feint in the Winsome's bar. Hell, people would
think he was cracking up if it happened too often. Placid Clarry was
beginning to exercise new-found and morbid speculations. Imagine wetting
his pants five minutes before heading for the loo. Or kissing Yolanda
before she was psyched up for the event.

But the final
contribution of future Clarry to younger Clarry was to be a show-stopper.
No one would ever really understand why it had happened at a
demonstration. They would never know why the weather had conspired so
cruelly with fate.

The demonstration
had been arranged with the confident assumption of normal atmospheric
opacity. But there were days in that valley where Clarry lived when the
past seemed to claim the scarred landscape of its industrial present. The
air, which was normally a hazy emulsion of fine grey ash with the pungent
overtones of a nearby factory, would, on such mornings, expand with
intimidating clarity to a horizon of mountains and distant bushland.
Postcards, stocked in those newsagencies near the tour-bus depots, strove
to capture this ambience, like postcards the world over, but the locals
never really believed in such weather. It didn't suit the functional
architecture. It was a cosmic mistake..

The shockingly
clear weather on the day of the demonstration was an embarrassment to the
organisers and a distinct discouragement to the marchers. Individuals felt
exposed, naked. The whole thing was going wrong. Mass movements, with
their blur of colour, the fused hum of common speech, the shapeless but
commanding resonance from mobile loudspeaker systems, could give people a
sense of belonging to something at once powerful, daring and morally
right, something greater than themselves. "I was there," they could say
later, and everyone knew immediately what being there meant.

Clarry was there
and wished he wasn't. Demonstrations weren't his thing and this one wasn't
even a proper demonstration. The weather was making it look like a group
of people with individual ideas. When the Channel 3 reporter put a
microphone under the noses of these people today they wouldn't have the
courage of The Movement. They were going to stumble and say something
personal like "I'm not sure. What do you think?"

Clarry usually
said things like that anyway. He was only here because Yolanda had said
"see you at the demo" in a voice that made it clear that all the real
people would be there. Actually it was a Labour Day march, which gave a
certain solidity to all the other' causes that turned up under
hand-painted banners. Clarry wasn't sure what cause he belonged to. He was
looking for Yolanda.

That was how he
came to be standing on the back of a truck when his hair burnt. A march
steward with a black arm-band and a megaphone was just about to chase
Clarry off the truck when it happened. The steward gasped audibly into the
megaphone. It was enough to attract some attention, but Clare's shriek a
second later riveted the crowed. A white hot bayonet had slashed his
scalp, a shaft of heat so intense that all consciousness contracted into
that dreadful, life-seeking sound.

It was odd,
really, that the hair burning had come first and by itself. There was no
accounting for the pattern of time leaks. Then again, there was no special
reason to expect the final slow-motion metamorphosis of younger Clary into
future Clarry. Perhaps the intensity of the hair burning triggered
something.

In any case, when
Clare's eyes melted and ran down his cheeks, Yolanda was watching. They
all were. In the terrible , clear air they saw his skin burst and his fat
sizzle on to the aluminium tray of the truck.

They were there
with Clarry in his agony. Certainly nobody happened to be looking north
five minutes later. They never saw the fireball.**

The Five Minute
Futurecopyright (c) Thor May 1997, all rights
reserved